This blog is all about Rotherhithe, past and present. The main themes are heritage, wildlife and news items that may be of interest to local residents. If you have any questions or would like to comment or ask me to cover any particular topic you can email me at andie [at] rotherhitheblog.co.uk. I am also on Twitter @AndieByrnes

Monday, November 2, 2015

I am very glad that I joined the Port of London Study Group, which meets weekly at the Museum of London Docklands. Every week we have two one-hour or one two-hour lecture about some aspect of the Port of London. Research is conducted within the group, and external speakers are invited too. I have only been a member for a few weeks but I am loving it.

This week's visiting speaker was Dr Nicholas Draper from the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project. He was superb. The first talk put London's docks into the economic context of the slave trade, explaining how the trade helped to finance the eastward growth of the West India and London Docks on the north banks of the Thames, and how the trade operated. One of the concrete outputs of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership
project is the database. When slavery was abolished it was decided
that slave owners needed to be compensated for the loss of their
workers. £20million was allocated to the compensation. Over a period
of four years the money was allocated and detailed records were made of
who were compensated when their slaves were freed. The Legacies of British Slave Ownership
project allows you to search under various different parameters but
perhaps the most interesting for some people will be looking up their
family name to see if their ancestors were compensated in the past for
the loss of their slaves, and were therefore slave owners. An
uncomfortable thought. I must be safe on my father's side but I do
worry about my mother's canal-building ancestors! I haven't yet investigated that possibility.
Here's the database address if you want to take the plunge and find out if your own family history includes slave trading: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

My head has been fizzing ever since with linkages, with the vast and
complex network of different commercial interests and innovations, with
the perception of that world becoming smaller by the day, with no ambition
being too big, with the sense of the drive that adapted itself so
painlessly to the idea that foreign people could be treated as
commodities like sugar, tobacco, rum or pack animals. Realities like the Empire and the slave trade are things that as a nation we are often embarrassed to talk about, but in tandem with other ventures, the slave trade was one of the complex enterprises that established the commercial foundations on which our economy and culture were built. As mortifying as it is today to recognize the less honourable parts of our past, we cannot ignore that those financial successes helped to form the nation that we have inherited today. Understanding how the slave trade fitted into the viability of the country as a commercial entity is essential to understanding our history. The Legacies of British Slave Ownership project is looking explicitly at some of the outcomes of the slave trade, at the contributions it made in a set of different but related areas, the "legacies" of the project's name. See the Legacies website for more about these.

What I am excited about from the point of view of this blog is that I am terribly uninformed about the slave trade, and I now know that there is an awful lot of research that I can pursue in the future with respect to Rotherhithe. For example, now that I know that slave trade incomes helped to finance the docks on the north banks of the Thames opposite Rotherhithe, I am going to use the database to see if local ship builders, ship owners, ships' captains and local notables were involved in slave ownership and how that impacted the social and economic life of the peninsula. It is almost certain that those who ordered East and West Indiamen from Rotherhithe builders had some interest in the slave trade, so that will be interesting to look into. The Rotherhithe docks were very under-developed prior to the 1833 Abolition,
although the Howland Great Wet Dock (1696) was funded partially by one
family’s East India profits and was used at least partly as a winter
base for East Indiamen, so that’s another avenue of investigation.

But even after the abolition of slavery in 1833, dirt-cheap labour was still being transported from where it was in ready supply to where it was needed, and I want to learn more about that too. For example, I posted a piece about the tea-clipper Borealis, built by Thomas Bilbe in 1864, well after the abolition of slavery, and that will now need rewriting. Bilbe was involved in the movement of Chinese “coolies” to Cuba as cheap labour, and I really need to go back and rethink the piece in the light of what I learned today (not to mention that it wasn't my best piece of writing ever!).

Today's lecture makes me look at everything I have been writing about Rotherhithe in a highly critical way and with a real sense of annoyance, although not for the first time. One of the eternal and irritating problems of blogging history is that it is fragmented, pulled ruthlessly from its context. It is the best way of using the time I have available to me, but I am always aware that the bigger picture is always lost in my blog. Ships, buildings, people, all lifted from their social and economic past and presented like excavated pieces in an Edwardian museum. I need to do something about that before too long.

So it's a huge thank-you to Dr Draper and the Port of London Study Group for giving me a lot of food for thought, and now it's back to my day job for the time being!

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A History of South Dock

I have assembled all my posts concerning the history and heritage of South Dock into a website of its own, which seemed to be a requirement following the announcement of the St George's Wharf development that will overshadow the South Dock area. It can be found at:http://southdockse16.wordpress.com

Aberdovey Londoner

In July 2018 I moved to Aberdovey on the mid Welsh coast, and began a blog there. It is a very different place and experiences are all completely novel. If you are interested, you can find it at https://aberdoveylondoner.wordpress.com

Port of London Study Group

If you are interested in the archaeology and history of the Port of London you may be interested in the Port of London Study Group, a self-guided research group that operates out of the Museum of London. Find out more at http://portoflondonstudy.wordpress.com.

British Transport Treasures

This blog is run with considerable assistance from excellent local history publications written by Stuart Rankin. His works are my starting point for all history posts. Stuart has set up a website, called British Transport Treasures, that specializes in out of print publications which can be downloaded as PDFs that can be saved and printed. Out of print publications are a nightmare for anyone attempting local history research unless they have access to a specialist library and archives. British Transport Treasures is expanding fast with an ever-growing catalogue of titles. Each of the publications is described with a magazine-style short review to explain the scope of the content, and provided with a preview of the cover and first page. There is a nominal cost for each, to cover the costs of hosting and running the site, and 5p per item sold is donated to Help For Heroes. I am a massive fan of the site and what it is attempting to do, and as it has a number of publications concerning Rotherhithe I have drawn attention to some of them here.